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Our future, our universe, and other weighty topics

Tuesday, May 31, 2016

We sometimes hear people
speaking about “gaps” in our scientific knowledge. People often
speak as if there were merely a few cracks or gaps in our scientific
knowledge, and that in the not-too-distant future those gaps will be
filled in (perhaps rather like some construction worker filling in
a few cracks in a wall, or like a photo restorer filling in a few
cracks in an old photo).

Is it correct to speak in
such a way? No, it isn't. But the reason is not that our scientific
knowledge is perfect. The reason is that our scientific knowledge is
so fragmentary and so tiny that it is misleading to use the term gaps
or cracks to refer to what we don't know. What we should be saying is
that what we do know is tiny, and what we do not know is vast.

Consider the current state
of our knowledge. We know about the surface of our planet and a few
other planets. But we live in a vast universe of billions of
galaxies, many of which have billions of stars. So we know nothing
about 99.99999999999999% of the planets of the universe.

We also know basically
nothing about most of the matter and energy in the universe.
Scientists say that 96% of the matter and energy is dark matter and
dark energy, which we know basically nothing about. We also have no
idea what caused the origin of the universe billions of years ago.
There are many mysteries regarding how we got from the supposedly
infinite density of the Big Bang to the orderly state the universe is
in now.

Considering only ourselves and our planet, we know almost nothing about mysteries
such as the origin of life and how our brains work. There is much
evidence of some great psychic reality that we are almost completely
ignorant about. Unraveling how the mind works seems a thousand year
project that we have barely started.

Given such realities, is
it accurate to say that there are “gaps” or “cracks” in our
knowledge? No, because such a term implies that we have learned a
good fraction of what there is to know. If someone asked you how much
you know about quantum chromodynamics, it would be most misleading
for you to say that there are gaps in your knowledge of quantum
chromodynamics (as that would imply you know a large fraction of that
topic). You should instead say that you know nothing or virtually nothing
about such a topic.

Rather than speaking of
gaps in our scientific knowledge, it is more truthful to say that our
knowledge of nature is fragmentary, and that we have acquired only a
few pieces in the vast jigsaw puzzle of nature. In the great
million-year project of unlocking the universe's secrets, we are
fledglings and newbies.

Those who sell a story of
scientific triumphalism often speak as if scientists are
like college juniors or seniors with not terribly much left to master
in the curriculum. But instead they (and the rest of us) are all like
kids who have merely finished the first few weeks of kindergarten.

Imagine a little child who
makes a trip to the seashore. After he observes a few seagulls and
fills up a bucket with shells, pebbles, and starfish, he may
congratulate himself on his splendid progress in understanding
nature. But ahead of him lies the vast and mysterious ocean, the
mysteries of which he has barely begun to unravel. That little child
is like humanity, which has so far accumulated only a few scattered
fragments of nature's deep and mysterious truths, too vast in number
to be enumerated.

But it is easy to
over-estimate how much we know, as the following little story
illustrates.

On a distant planet there
was a king who was curious about biology, and who wanted to know all
about beings such as himself. So he told his chief scientist, “Find
out all about the biology of creatures such as you and me.”

The chief scientist was a
bright young person with lots of energy, so he trekked around the
planet, for 10 years, making an exhaustive study of body shapes, skin
color, hair color, and external differences in form. He then returned
to the king, and triumphantly reported that he had found out almost
everything there was to know about creatures such as himself and the
king.

“No, you have barely
skimmed the surface,” said the king. “For you forgot to
investigate what is inside creatures such as you and me.”

So the chief scientist
spent 20 years doing dissection of corpses, to learn about internal
anatomy. He then announced triumphantly to the king that he had
learned practically everything there was to know about creatures such
as himself and the king.

“No, you have barely
skimmed the surface,” said the king. “For you forgot to
investigate what is inside creatures such as you and me, on a
microscopic level.”

So the chief scientist
spent 30 years doing microscopic studies. He then announced
triumphantly to the king that he had learned practically everything
there was to know about creatures such as himself and the king.

But then the king asked
him to explain the origin of life, to explain the mystery of
development, to explain the mystery of where and how body plans are
stored, to explain the origin of astounding biological complexity, and to explain the mystery of consciousness. The chief
scientist could not explain these things in a satisfactory way. It
seemed that understanding life required some deeper level of
understanding that the chief scientist would never be able to reach
in his lifetime. It also seemed that there are many layers to the
riddle of life, and that understanding the next layer is always twice
as hard as understanding the previous layer. Sadly the king once
again told the scientist: “You have barely skimmed the surface.”

Our scientists are often like
this chief scientist, often tending to triumphantly declare
their mastery of a topic when they have barely skimmed the surface of
some subject with oceanic depths.

Friday, May 27, 2016

In
Aeon magazine recently there is an
essay by psychologist Robert Epstein with the provocative title
The Empty Brain. Below the title is an equally provocative essay
synopsis:

Your
brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store
memories. In short: your brain is not a computer.

The
idea that Epstein is attacking is the doctrine of computationalism,
the doctrine that the mind or brain is like a computer, and that the
outputs of the mind and brain are like computations. I think Epstein
is right to attack this doctrine. But the type of attack Epstein
makes on computationalism isn't a terribly skillful one. Some of
the points Epstein makes are rather dubious, and he neglects to make
some of the best points that can be made against computationalism.

Epstein
argues as follows:

Computers
really do operate on symbolic
representations
of the world. They really store
and retrieve.
They really process.
They really have physical memories.
They really are guided in everything they do, without exception, by
algorithms.
Humans,
on the other hand, do not – never did, never will. Given this
reality, why do so many scientists talk about our mental life as if
we were computers?

A
small part of this reasoning could be argued through a certain line
of reasoning, but not one that Epstein attempts. It can be argued
that our memories are not actually stored physically in our brains,
that somehow memory involves some larger unknown, on the grounds that
we have no understanding of how neurons can store memories. Some of
the other claims, however, seem rather dubious. Humans operate using
words, and words are “symbolic representations of the world.”
When we memorize facts and then recall those facts (as a student will
do when studying for a test), that is a process that can reasonably
be described as storing and retrieving, even though we have no idea
of exactly how or where those facts are stored, and can't even be
sure that they are being stored in the brain itself.

Epstein
then argues at some length that humans are not information
processors. This line of reasoning seems strange. Imagine you get a
phone call from your friend, who tells you he is is stuck downtown
because he ran out of money and doesn't have bus fare to return home.
You get in your car to meet him downtown to drive him home. The
phone call can surely be considered information, and your act of
driving downtown as a result of that call can be considered
processing the information. So why should we not think that humans
are information processors? Similarly, when we simply memorize a
fact, that can be considered processing a piece of information.

The
best way to attack computationalism is a way that Epstein seems to
overlook: look for important aspects or outputs of the human mind
that are completely unlike anything produced by computers. The way
to refute the “your mind is just a computer” thinkers is not to
argue “the mind never computes” but to argue “the mind does so
much more than just compute.” So let us ask: what outputs does the
human mind have that are not produced to any extent at all by
computers?

The
first output I can think of is understanding. Humans have this, but
computers do not. The most expensive supercomputer ever produced has
never had the slightest understanding of anything. Given certain
prompts, a computer can retrieve relevant information. But it
understands nothing.

Let
us imagine American foreign-exchange students working at a big
library in China, Americans who cannot understand spoken or written
Chinese. Let us suppose that people come to an information desk of
the library, with questions and information requests written in Chinese on slips
of paper. Imagine that the American library workers cannot
understand any of the questions, but have worked out a system by
which certain information sheets or books (all in Chinese) will be
given to those who have certain Chinese words (or series of words) on
their information request slips. This is rather how a computer
works. When you do a Google search for “United States,” some
computer server at Google may be able to figure outthat certain information items are
to be sent back to you in response to this request. But that computer
has not the slightest understanding of any of these information
items, nor does it have the slightest understanding of what the
United States is.

And
so it basically is for all computer processing. Every single time you
ask a computer for information, it is completely lacking in
understanding of what you asked and what the outputs are that it gave
back to you. When you ask your computer what was the birth date of
President Abraham Lincoln, it may very quickly respond: February 12,
1809. But your computer has not the slightest understanding of what a
president is, what a birth date is, what any date is, who Abraham
Lincoln was, or what a person is. What you see in this case is a
correlation between a fact and the computer response. But we should
not confuse a correlation with cognition.

Computers
have not an iota of understanding. This is one major reason why we
should not be comparing the human mind to a computer. Another
gigantic reason is that probably the essential output of the human
mind is what we might variously call consciousness, experience, or
life-flow: a stream of experiences of the type someone has when that
person is consciously living a particular day. We can define
life-flow as the stream of thoughts, feelings, and sensations that
go on while you are awake, but which temporarily stop while you are
sleeping. Such life-flow is the most essential output of the human
mind. But computers have no such output. No computer has ever had the
slightest bit of life-flow. It's futile to try to ask ourselves what
it is like to be a computer, because computers have not the slightest
bit of life-flow.

So
because it provides understanding and life-flow (also called
experience), the human mind is something vastly more than just a
computer (which has no such things as its output). Calling the human
mind or brain a computer is like calling your smartphone a camera.
Your smartphone includes a not-very-good camera, but it has vastly
more (also allowing you to call people, run apps, play games, and
browse the internet). Similarly it's rather as if the human mind has
a not-very-good computer inside it, but its main outputs are things
(understanding and life-flow) that are totally different from
computer outputs.

Although
Epstein seems to err in trying to completely deny a computation
aspect of the human mind, he is correct in suggesting the futility of
all attempts to explain the human mind in a mechanical kind of way.

Monday, May 23, 2016

One
of the most sublime human emotions is the one we call awe. It's not very common for a modern person to feel it. But imagine you are a
New York City dweller used to seeing maybe two or three stars in the
sky. Imagine you take a vacation in Colorado. You book a campsite in
Rocky Mountain National Park. After nightfall you lie near your tent
and look up at the sky. You are astonished. You can now see not just
two or three stars, but thousands of stars. Plus you can see some
strange faint band stretching across the sky. It looks like some
ghostly river. You realize you are looking at the plane of the Milky
Way galaxy. You suddenly feel a strange emotion you have rarely felt
before. It is as if you have got in touch with some magnificent
reality vastly greater than your little self. You experience an awe
you will long remember.

But
why do people even feel such a rare emotion? In last week's edition of
the Huffington Post, psychology professor Dacher Keltner attempts an
explanation, in a rather long article entitled Why Do We Feel Awe?
But his explanation doesn't hold water. He starts off with this
suggestion:

Why
did awe became part of our species’ emotional repertoire during
seven million years of hominid evolution? A preliminary answer is
that awe binds us to social collectives and enables us to act in more
collaborative ways that enable strong groups, thus improving our odds
for survival.

This
hypothesis is unbelievable. Awe has nothing us to do with binding to
social collectives, nothing to do with enabling social groups, and
nothing to do with collaboration. Awe does nothing to improve any
organism's odds for survival.

We
might be able to explain fear using a Darwinian explanation, on the
grounds that an organism that is afraid of scary sights is more
likely to flee predators. But awe is something different from fear.
When you look up at a sky filled with stars, you feel awe, but you
feel no fear at all. Nothing could be less scary than a distant star.

To
try to justify his explanation for why humans feel awe, Keltner cites
an experiment:

My
colleague Michelle Shiota had participants fill in the blank of the
following phrase: “ I AM ____.” They did so 20 times, either
while standing before an awe-inspiring replica of a T. rex skeleton
in UC Berkeley’s Museum of Paleontology or in the exact same place
but oriented to look down a hallway, away from the T. rex. Those
looking at the dinosaur were more likely to define their individual
selves in collectivist terms—as a member of a culture, a species, a
university, a moral cause. Awe embeds the individual self in a social
identity.

This
is rather hilarious. The skeleton was not even a real T. rex
skeleton, but only a replica (probably something made out of plaster
or plastic). Why would someone feel awe looking at some fake dinosaur
skeleton?

Equally
questionable is the experiment which Keltner describes below, involving some
trees near a campus science building:

Participants
first either looked up into the tall trees for one minute—long
enough for them to report being filled with awe—or oriented 90
degrees away to look up at the facade of a large science building.
They then encountered a person who stumbled, dropping a handful of
pens into the dirt. Sure enough, the participants who had been gazing
up at the awe-inspiring trees picked up more pens.

This
is as dubious as the experiment with the fake dinosaur skeleton.
Looking up at tall trees doesn't produce awe. Trees are too common to
produce a feeling of awe. The fact that some participants may have
reported that they felt awe (when presented with a questionnaire
asking whether they did) is probably just a case of suggestibility or
people reporting that they had a feeling that they thought they were
supposed to have. Similarly, if you show a picture of a beggar to a
man and ask if it makes him sad, someone who does not feel sad will
often say he does feel sad, as a kind of act of social obligation or
acting in the suggested or expected way. Since Keltner merely says
that these tree gazers “picked up more pens” rather than saying
they picked up “many more pens” (and since the paper linked to
does not mention any specific numbers regarding this experiment or
any level of statistical significance), we can assume the effect he
is reporting is minimal or perhaps not even statistically
significant. Such a result tells us nothing.

At
this link the experiment is described in detail, and the paper claims
that “Participants who gazedup
at the trees offered more help to an experimenter than did
participants who gazed up at a building,” but offers no specific
numbers backing up such a claim. So we must conclude the effect was
minimal or marginal – for all we know, it could have been merely a
“1% greater” type of effect.

What
we have here is rather silly psychology experimentation on a
shoestring budget. To do a decent experiment on awe, you should do
something like take people to the Grand Canyon or to a mountain place
with crystal clear air where you can see 6000 stars at night. Then
when you suddenly showed them the awesome scenery, they might
experience awe. The experiment Keltner describes are “science on a
shoestring” type of experiments that probably tell us nothing about
awe, because they don't involve things that produce awe to a
significant degree. It's as if the experimenters were too lazy to
leave their local campus, and find something really awe-inspiring.

I
may note that inexpensive short-duration experiments like this are
generally of little worth whenever they report modest effects or
borderline effects (as in this case). If some college does a 2-year
long study costing 5 million dollars, that has some weight, because
presumably there would not been have time and money to try such a
study multiple times and then report only one version. But it's a
totally different situation for inexpensive short-duration studies.
Let's say I'm a professor trying to show that wearing some color of
shirt affects your test score performance. I could do 20 one-day
studies (asking my students to wear a particular color on each of 20
test days), and then cherry pick a particular day, which ever day
seemed to best support a “shirt color influences test scores”
hypothesis. I could then author a scientific paper reporting only on
that particular day's test. Of course, that really wouldn't give any
evidence for such a hypothesis. I would just be making an
inappropriate use of random fluctuations in test data.

Also
of little evidence value is a TV watching study described in this
paper (Study 3), which reports only marginal results. On page 8 of
the pdf, the authors report that they tried to experimentally induce
awe by showing a “5-minute clip inducing awe, consisting of nature
clips from the BBC’s Planet Earth series composed of grand,
sweeping shots of scenic vistas, mountains, plains, forests,
and canyons.” Such “eye candy” clips don't actually produce
awe. If you see a real canyon, it may produce awe, but seeing one on
television will not (unless you've never seen a canyon before on
television, or unless you're watching a good science fiction showing
some type of stunning scenery you've never seen before). Moreover,
the procedure described in Study 3 is so convoluted that it is
lacking in any evidence value. A supposed slight increase in
generosity was measured by a willingness to donate points in some
computer game, but the supposed difference in generosity involved
giving away a few more points which each had a cash value of only
pennies.

Similarly
weak from an evidence standpoint is Study 1 in the paper. Based on a
very dubious analysis of a person's tendency to feel awe, the study
reports a weak .123 correlation between awe and a tendency to give
away imaginary money in a game. I need not say much about the
weakness of that, other than to point out that a compelling
correlation is one that is, say, something like .700. Even when
correlations are much greater than .700 they are often coincidental.
This web site lists correlations of greater than .900 between totally
unrelated things, such as a .9925 correlation between the divorce
rate in Maine and the per capita consumption of margarine.

I
find the experiments of Keltner and his colleagues on this matter to
be quite unconvincing. It seems these are the type of results that anyone
could get to support any random psychology hypothesis he wanted to
support, just by doing 20 shoestring-budget short-duration
experiments and then reporting the few in which random data
variations best supported the hypothesis.

Keltner
tries to suggest that awe is something very social, but it isn't.
Quite to the contrary, awe is the least social of all emotions. When
you look at a sky filled with stars, you are absorbed in that
external glory, and are least likely to be thinking about another
human.

Keltner's
suggestion that awe is something that improved an early human's odds
of survival is without any merit. Quite to the contrary, we should
assume that awe is something that decreased an early human's odds of
survival. Show me a caveman who spent quite a bit of time staring up
at the stars with a feeling of awe, and I will show you a caveman
more likely to have been killed by a predator while he is distracted
by this activity that did nothing to help his chances of survival.
Show me a caveman who spent quite a bit of time watching the sun set
while he felt awe, and I will show you a caveman who would have been
more likely to be killed by a predator while he is distracted by this
activity that did nothing to help his chances of survival. Show me
a caveman who tended to go out of his cave and watch a lightning
storm with awe, and I'll show you a caveman more likely to have been
struck dead by a lightning bolt. Show me a caveman who stood staring
in awe at the big tusks of a mastadon, and I'll show you a caveman
more likely to have been gored to death by those tusks. Show me a
caveman fond of climbing mountains to experience awe-inspiring
vistas, and I'll show you a caveman more likely to die in an accident
while scaling such heights.

There
is no plausible Darwinian explanation for the emotion of awe, just as
there is no plausible Darwinian explanation for numerous other
aspects of the human mind – things such as musical ability, grammar
ability, philosophical reasoning, spirituality, insight, altruism,
and mathematical ability. AsI arguehere, these are things that do not increase an
organism's survival value in a natural setting, and which therefore
cannot be explained through a simplistic explanation of natural
selection. We must postulate that something much more was involved in
the origin of humanity than just random mutations and natural
selection.

If
you have a spark of the divine in you, or a soul, you should probably
expect that encountering some reality much grander than yourself
might trigger some sublime emotion, something like awe. But if you
were merely the soulless product of blind chance, you should expect
no such thing. If blind Darwinian processes were all that were
involved in our origins, you should expect that when you look up at
a mountain sky of 6000 dim, distant stars, you should feel absolutely
nothing.

Thursday, May 19, 2016

Genetic
engineering was in the news this week. One news item was a National
Academy of Sciences study claiming that GMO's (genetically modified
food products) are safe. Given how financially entangled
scientists are with GMO's, a study written by a committee of
scientists may not mean very much. The 2015 scientific paper here is entitled "No Scientific Consensus on GMO Safety." I may
note that declaring GMO's are safe (based on past results) may be
like declaring that walking through a landmine field is safe, when
you are halfway through the landmine field, on the basis that you
haven't been blown up yet. Since GMO's are a continuous stream of
new products, we can never be sure when the next gene-gamble product
may blow up in our faces with devastating results.

Also in the news this week was a secret meeting recently of 150 scientists and
entrepreneurs recently at Harvard Medical School. The meeting was to
discuss the outrageous idea of making an artificial human genome.
This is something exponentially more risky than just creating
genetically modified foods. I guess the secrecy of the meeting is a
clue as to how things will work in the future, in regard to human
genetic engineering. It will probably be very secretive type of work.

It's
not hard to figure out why scientists would want to be secretive when
engaging in human genetic engineering. The reason is there's a very
large chance that attempts at playing God with the human genome will
result in hideous failures. Such failures may be given some
euphemistic name such as “suboptimal engineering results,” but
since the results may be grotesquely deformed humans, a simpler
description will simply be “monsters.”

Such
failures are almost guaranteed because of all the uncertainties.
Contrary to the impression you may have been given, the human genome
is not some clearly intelligible blueprint for a human body. The
human genome is a collection of chemicals and on/off switches. How
these chemicals and on/off switches add up to a human body plan is
anything but clear. In fact, there are quite a few reasons for
believing that the human genome does not even store the body plan of
humans (as discussedhere). Even if the genome does store the human body, then
that body plan is stored in an exceptionally obscure, roundabout,
recondite way. The human genome is like some tower-sized tangled ball
of wire, harder to unravel then 50 million lines of what programmers
call “spaghetti code.”

The
human genome has been compared to machine language, the series of 0's
and 1's that are read directly by a computer, but are
all-but-unintelligible to humans. In trying to change the human
genome, our genetic engineers are like hackers trying to modify a
billion bytes of machine language, a body of code which is almost
entirely unintelligible.So
it is inevitable that many mistakes will be made in the first
attempts at human genetic engineering.

We
can imagine all kinds of shocking results: humans with a single eye
above their noses, humans with mouths that are always wide open,
humans with fin-like hands, humans with legs fused together, humans
with heads that always droop down, humans without skin, humans with
skin that sags down 4 inches, or humans with eyes that can only be
opened with the fingers.

We
can imagine how damaging it would be to a human genetic engineering
effort if a single photo were to be released of a monstrous human
body that was the result of faulty genetic engineering. So I imagine
that those engaging in genetic engineering of humans will want to
keep things secret. A single memorable photo can have a huge effect
on public opinion, as was shown by that photo during the Vietnam War
of the crying girl fleeing a napalm attack.

But
how will the human genetic engineers enforce secrecy? They might do
that by making use of the national security apparatus which enforces
such draconian penalties for revealing state secrets. It might work
like this: the human genetic engineers will appeal to the US
government, asking that their efforts be declared a state secret, a
secret important to US national security. You can imagine all kind
of rationales that might be used. They might claim that the ultimate
goal of genetically engineering humans was to create better soldiers,
and that therefore genetic engineering of humans should be as secret
as developing new types of fighter-jets or tanks.

Once
their efforts were classified, the human genetic engineers would have
a way to cover up the unfortunate accidents that would be not-uncommon
products of their efforts. Perhaps ugly mutants resulting from
genetic engineering will be killed off to get rid of evidence of
their existence. Or perhaps they will be confined to special
confinement cells, hidden from public view. Anyone who photographed
such monsters might receive a 20-year prison sentence, on the grounds
that he had released classified government information that must be kept
secret on national security grounds.

Does
it sound too far-fetched to imagine a future government throwing
someone in jail for a long time merely for revealing ugly government
secrets? I don't think this is too hard to believe, given that
Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley Manning) is now serving a long
prison sentence, mainly for releasing to WikiLeaks an embarrassing
video showing a US army helicoptercarelessly gunning down
civilians.

The
hideous truth of genetic engineering failures will be hidden from the
public. In the future the public will see pleasant advertisements like the one
below, which advertise cases of successful genetic engineering.

But
the public will never learn about the places where the hideous
failures of genetic engineering will be kept – places like that shown
below:

Sunday, May 15, 2016

On a
blog that is part of the National Geographic web site, a blogger
named Nadia Drake posted a post this week with the title “What
Hillary Clinton Says About Aliens Is Totally Misguided.” I was
surprised by this insinuation that Hillary Clinton had stated a
position about aliens. Each day I have been following the
presidential campaign coverage on cable TV – how come I had not heard anyone mention it?

To back
up this claim, Drake has a link to an interview in which Hillary
Clinton says, “There’s enough stories out there that I
don’t think everybody is just sitting, you know, in their kitchen making them
up.” This is the only relevant Hillary Clinton quote which Drake
cites.

When I took a
look at the interview, I found the relevant part was at 24:11. Here is
what Clinton said after being asked about disclosing government UFO
files.

Clinton: I want to
open the files as much as we can. If mean if there's some huge
national security thing, and I can't get agreement to open them, I
won't. But I do want to open them. Because I'm interested.

Interviewer: Do you
believe?

Clinton: I don't
know. I want to see what the information shows, right? But there are
enough stories out there that I don’t think everybody is just
sitting, you know, in their kitchen making them up. I think people
see things. What they see, I don't know.

Drake provides no evidence
at all that Clinton has said anything about aliens. Her claim that
Hillary Clinton has said something about aliens is therefore
inaccurate. Contrary to her insinuation that Hillary Clinton said
something about aliens in the interview, Clinton sounded entirely
noncommittal, by twice using the phrase “I don't know” to
indicate a lack of any position on whether aliens exist. Drake has
misled us by both insinuating that Clinton stated some position on
aliens (which she did not), and also insinuating that Clinton
advanced some flaky position that is “totally misguided.” Her
actual statements on the matter are noncommittal and perfectly
reasonable to anyone thinking that the public should be
well-informed.

The misleading title of
Drake's blog post is not the only fib Drake commits. She starts out
her blog post with a lie. She says, “In the spring of 1999,
a UFO flew over downtown Ithaca, New York.” After referring to this thing as an "alien object," in the second
paragraph she again refers to this object as a UFO. But much later
in her post she tells us that this object was actually an
upside-down frying pan with a saucepan lid over it – something that she
and a classmate had deliberately made to make a fake UFO photo –
something she rigged up to a wire (so therefore an object which could
not actually have “flown over” the city of Ithaca).

UFO means “unidentified
flying object.” It is quite okay to use that term for any object
that is both unidentified and flying. So if you see something flying
that you can't identify, you can truthfully call that a UFO,
even if you later find out that is was natural or man-made. But it is untruthful to use the term UFO to refer to an object that
you have constructed yourself for the sake of making a fake UFO
photo, for such an object is never unidentified. It was also untruthful for Drake to have used a photo of her fake
frying-pan UFO that had the caption, “After a few minutes, the
spacecraft turned east and flew over the Cornell campus.”

The rest of Drake's blog
post is an attempted debunking of UFO sightings, and it is one of the
laziest attempts at UFO debunking I have ever read. Drake shows no
evidence of having read up on any specific UFO incidents. She limits
herself to lame armchair arguments and irrelevant reminiscing about
her summer internships.

Drake suggests that
eyewitness testimony cannot be trusted, and says “check out the
decades of research that have been done on the reliability of
witnesses testifying in court.” Hardly a compelling argument, since
we very often do send people to years in prison based solely on
eyewitness testimony, because such testimony is in the great majority
of cases largely correct. Furthermore, a typical UFO sighting will
be written down very quickly, after a time gap much shorter than the
months that often elapse between a crime and a witness testimony
describing that crime in court. The fact that someone may make a
mistake about identifying a face is no reason at all for doubting the
accuracy of someone who claims to have seen a huge extremely bright
object speeding across the sky (or a mile-long UFO, as at least 30
witnesses reported during the sightings at Stephenville, Texas).

From an observational
standpoint, a face is a set of fine details, but UFO reports are
almost never reports of fine details – they are instead reports of
extremely conspicuous deviations from normality in the sky. Since it
is much, much easier to recognize extremely conspicuous deviations
from normality in the sky than to recognize faces, any human
imperfection in recognizing faces does nothing to impugn the reality
of UFO reports.

Drake then trots out the
old skeptic slogan that extraordinary claims require extraordinary
evidence. This is a silly slogan, and those who use it never specify
what they mean by extraordinary evidence. In the case of UFOs there
is, in fact, the most extraordinary evidence of close encounters.
Some of the most extraordinary findings of science have been made by
just piling up ordinary observations. There's no claim more
extraordinary than the claim of the Big Bang, but the evidence that
established it is just ordinary kind of evidence such as red shifts
and a radiation reading from an unimpressive-looking
device in New Jersey. If you were to claim that someone could
levitate a rock, that would be an extraordinary claim, but you could
establish it with ordinary types of evidence such as three
simultaneous live broadcasts by local news stations, and sworn
testimony by 20 witnesses.

In her discussion of UFO
evidence, Drake implies that it is “little more than unverified
anecdotes,” which is a quite misleading statement given the massive
photographic evidence (both still photos and videos) that have been
made of UFOs. Photographs and videos are not anecdotes. As for
“unverified anecdotes,” imagine if 30 people all reported severe
stomach pains after eating at a restaurant. Until chemical tests were
done, such accounts would be “unverified anecdotes,” but they
would be a highly reliable indicator that something important and
worthy of attention had occurred.

My suggestions to Ms.
Drake are as follows: (1) don't mislead your readers by claiming that
a presidential candidate “says about aliens” something that is
“totally misguided” when the candidate actually twice said “I
don't know” when asked about whether she believed in UFOs; (2)
don't publish photos of fake UFOs you have built; (3) if you do
publish a photo of a fake UFO you have built, don't put a
serious-looking caption underneath the photo making the phony claim
that the object is a spacecraft; (4) if you try to debunk UFOs, try
to show some slight indication that you have studied the evidence.

Thursday, May 12, 2016

The
probe from another universe suddenly appeared high in the Earth's
atmosphere, at an altitude of 10 kilometers. With a good portable
telescope, you could see the probe as a strange glowing sphere in the
sky. The probe continued to hang mysteriously in the same spot in
the upper atmosphere. After weeks of anxiety, the visitors from
another universe finally broadcast their intentions.

At
the White House, President Joe Hunt listed to the transmission that
was picked up and broadcast worldwide.

Do
not fear us. We have come in peace. We offer great benefits to your
primitive race. We can give you the solution to your most pressing
problems.

“Mr.
President, can I have a word with you?” asked General Stack.

“Don't
bother me,” said President Hunt. “Those weird visitors with that
probe in the upper atmosphere are finally telling us who they are.”

You
may think that we are visitors from some other planet in your
universe. But we are not. We have come from an entirely different
universe, a universe very different from yours. Our universe is not
mainly empty space, like your universe. Our universe is almost
entirely water. There is no empty space anywhere in our universe.

“Mr.
President, I must insist on having a word with you,” said General
Stack.

“Dammit,
don't bother me,” said President Hunt. “I'm listening to
creatures from another universe, for God's sake.”

You
may be surprised by how suddenly our probe appeared in your universe.
This is because we opened up a space-time wormhole that allows
instantaneous transport between our universe and your universe. So
now we will be able to travel to your universe, and you will be able
to travel to our universe.

“Mr.
President, don't you remember we launched nuclear missiles against
that probe?” said General Stack.

“What
the hell – when did that happen?” asked the President.

“We
already got your authorization,” said General Stack. “Remember we
asked for permission to launch a Type Red preemptive counter-measure,
using a Full Triad implementation?”

“Oh,
for God's sake, I can't believe you got me to authorize that using
all that confusing military jargon,” said President Hunt. “I
didn't even know what I was agreeing to. No problem, just recall the
missiles.”

“But
Mr. President, nuclear missiles cannot be recalled once they've been
launched,” said General Stack.

Ten
minutes later, the nuclear missiles exploded in the upper atmosphere.
The probe from another universe was blown up into a thousand pieces.

“If
the voters ever find out I blew up peaceful visitors, my re-election
prospects may be killed,” lamented President Hunt. “Let's hope
the voters forget about this.”

Within
an hour after the mysterious probe was destroyed, it started to rain
very hard. It keep raining for the rest of the day. It was like a
summer shower that wouldn't let up. The rain made the sad mood of
the day even worse.

When
President Hunt went to bed, he assumed that the rain would be over by
the time he woke up. But when he woke up the next morning, the rain
was still coming down full blast. His advisers notified him of
record flooding in Washington D.C.

The
full-blast rain continued throughout the day. Hunt wondered: is this
some divine punishment for the destruction of the visitors from
another universe?

Hunt
called in his science adviser, a man named Ed Fulton.

“What's
going on with all this rain?” asked the President. “Why does it
keep going full-blast?”

“I
have a frightening idea that might explain that,” said Fulton. “I
think water may be pouring through the wormhole that was opened up in
the upper atmosphere.”

“Water
from a wormhole?” asked the President incredulously.

“Don't
you remember what the visitors said before they were destroyed?”
asked Fulton. “They said they were from a universe filled with
water, in which there was no empty space. They also said they had
opened up a wormhole from their universe to ours. When we destroyed
their probe with our nuclear weapons, maybe we didn't destroy their
wormhole. Maybe their probe was kind of like the plug on the end of a
fire hose. So we destroyed the plug, and now the fire hose – the
wormhole – is still there. And it's causing water to pour forth
from their water-filled universe into our universe.”

“Oh,
my God,” said the President. “I know what I can do. I'll have the
military launch more nuclear missiles to try to blow up that
wormhole.”

Missile
after missile was launched, but none of them did any good. The water
continued to pour forth through the wormhole in the upper atmosphere,
passing from the water-filled universe into the skies of planet
Earth. The result was non-stop rainfall, like a summer shower that
just wouldn't stop.

Soon
it was clear that all of Washington D.C. would be underwater.
President Hunt moved the White House to the top of the new World
Trade Center in New York City. He looked through the windows as more
and more of New York City was submerged by the great flood.

When
it became clear that all New York City would be submerged by the
flood, the President and some top aides got in a helicopter that took
them to a base in the Rocky Mountains. Sad news reports came in of
city after city being submerged by the flood.

After
several months it became clear that even the Rocky Mountains would
soon be underwater. The president's helicopter left the mountain
base, and landed on an aircraft carrier. With almost the entire
country underwater, the only survivors were those living on aircraft
carriers or other ships.

On
the aircraft carrier President Hunt gloomily walked the deck with
General Stack.

"How
much food do we have on this carrier?” asked President Hunt.

“Only
enough to last us for eight weeks,” said General Stack sadly.

“Isn't
it ironic?” observed President Hunt. “On this aircraft carrier we got all this fancy stuff that we don't need, but we don't have the
simple thing we do need. We have the finest fighter-jets ever made.
Worthless.
We have the finest electronic equipment ever built. Worthless!
But
we don't have the simple thing we need: a few hundred fishing rods
with long lines.”

Sunday, May 8, 2016

A
recent paper published in the journal Astrobiology has got quite a
bit of online news coverage. Newsweek covered the paper with an
article entitled, “Intelligent Alien Life Almost Certainly Existed
Somewhere Else, Study Says.” The Newsweek article then says, “The
new equation estimates a one in 10 billion trillion chance that
humans are the only intelligent species to have ever existed.” But
the paper actually estimates no such thing. A careful examination of
the paper will show that it doesn't really clarify the likelihood of
extraterrestrial intelligence.

Authored
by A. Frank and W. T. Sullivan III, the paper is entitled “A New
Empirical Constraint on the Prevalence of Technological Species in
the Universe,” although, as we will see, the paper actually
presents no such constraint. The basic idea of the paper is to kind
of present a simpler version of the famous Drake equation used to
estimate the number of planets with extraterrestrial intelligence. The paper
mentions a form of the Drake equation which says that the total
number of technological species that have evolved in the universe is
equal to the product of the following thing:

the
total number of stars

the
fraction of those stars that form planets

the
average number of planets in the habitable zone of a star with
planets

the
probability that a habitable zone planet develops life

the
probability that a planet with life develops intelligence

the
probability that a planet with intelligent life develops technology

The
paper attempts to simplify this equation into a simpler equation that
says that the total number of technological species that have
evolved in the universe is equal to the product of:

the
total number of habitable zone planets

the total
‘‘biotechnical’’ probability that a given habitable zone
planet has ever evolved a technological species (here “given”
means “average” or “randomly selected”)

(The
latter probability should not be confused with the “total
biotechnical probability that at least one habitable zone
planet has ever evolved a technological species,” which is
presumably a probability of 100%, since we exist.)

The
paper estimates 2 X 1022 (twenty billion trillion) as the
total number of stars in the observable universe. Using that figure,
the paper estimates that if the total ‘‘biotechnical’’
probability that a given habitable zone planet has ever evolved a
technological species is greater than about 1 in 2.5 X 10-24
(two chances in a trillion trillion), then mankind is unlikely to be
the first technological species to appear in the universe.

So
what is that telling us? Nothing we didn't already know. We already
knew our galaxy has about 200 billion stars, and that there
are billions of other galaxies. Multiply 200 billion by, say, 50
billion, and you have a number similar to 2 X 1024 (two
trillion trillion). So if the chance of intelligent life appearing on
a particular planet is greater than about 1 in a trillion trillion,
there will be many planets with intelligent life. But if the chance
of intelligent life appearing on a particular planet is much smaller
than about 1 in a trillion trillion, then we might be the only
planet with intelligent life. Anybody could have done that math
without reading this paper.

Why,
then, are the authors claiming to have reached a “new empirical
constraint” on the number of technological species in the universe?
Their paper really adds nothing. Since the Drake equation was created
back in the 1960's, there has been only one relevant development.
That development is that the “fraction of those stars that form
planets” and the “average number of planets in the habitable
zone of a star with planets” (referred to above) have been
clarified – we now know these numbers are pretty high. But that
development has been a gradual thing that has been decades in the
making, so it's not like Frank and Sullivan should be having some
sudden “Aha!” moment relating to that.

Far
from having been clarified, probabilities in regard to the evolution
of civilized life on other planets are still about as unclear as
anything could be. We simply have no basis for estimating “the
total biotechnical probability that a given habitable zone planet has
ever evolved a technological species.” Part of the problem is that
such a probability must be computed by considering all of these
probabilities:

the
probability that self-replicating molecules would ever appear on a
random planet in the habitable zone of a star

the
probability that a genetic code would somehow arise on this planet

the
probability that cells and proteins would ever appear

the
probability that microscopic life would ever evolve into highly
organized and coordinated large organisms

the
probability that intelligent life capable of building civilizations
would ever appear if large organisms had appeared

Basically
nothing has happened during the past 50 years to clarify any of these
probabilities. If there is not some type of teleological fine-tuning
or extraordinary factor or undiscovered cosmic laws which makes these
probabilities high on many different planets, then it is
all-too-possible that some of these probabilities may be virtually
zero. Some of these items on this list (particularly the items at
the top of this list) look pretty much like miracles, and really
nothing has been done to establish that they are things that would
happen in even one case in a trillion trillion trillion planets.
Accordingly, it is very possible that the “total biotechnical
probability that a given habitable zone planet has ever evolved a
technological species” could be some probability that is virtually
zero. In such a case, man would be alone in the universe. (Again,
the probability discussed here is the chance of a technological
species on an average planet, not the known probability that it has
evolved on one planet.)

I
may note that Newsweek completely errs when its article states,
"The new equation estimates a one in 10 billion trillion chance that
humans are the only intelligent species to have ever existed.” In
fact, the study doesn't even estimate a likelihood that humans are
the only intelligent species to have ever existed. It merely states
that if the chance of an intelligent species existing on an average
planet is greater than 1 in 2.5 X 10-24 (two chances in a
trillion trillion), then other intelligent species should have
existed. But the study does not estimate either that the likelihood
of man being alone in the universe is only 1 in 10 billion trillion,
not does it estimate that such a likelihood is less than 50%.

But
in the press release for the study, Frank tries to spice up things by
suggesting an arbitrary probability not even mentioned in the study.
That's a good way to gin up interest, but not so good from the
standpoint of describing your paper that never mentioned such a
thing. Frank says this:

Think
of it this way. Before our result you'd be considered a pessimist if
you imagined the probability of evolving a civilization on a
habitable planet were, say, one in a trillion. But even that guess,
one chance in a trillion, implies that what has happened here on
Earth with humanity has in fact happened about a 10 billion other
times over cosmic history!

This
probability of 1 in a trillion is never mentioned in the study, nor
is an estimate of 10 billion other civilizations. As for the
estimate of 10 billion other civilizations, this is just a case of
“picking a number out of a hat.” The same thing used to be done
by the late astronomer Carl Sagan, who used to estimate that there
were 100 million civilizations in our galaxy. Such estimates are
purely arbitrary guesses, very much “picking a number out of a
hat,” because we do not understand the likelihood of life appearing
by chance on a planet in the habitable zone. There is no basis for
suggesting a probability of 1 in a trillion for a civilization
appearing on a habitable planet. Given the difficulties of life
getting starting from chemicals through chance events, it is still
quite possible that the chance of life appearing on a random planet
may be much less than 1 in a trillion, and even much less than 1 in
10 billion trillion – perhaps as low in 1 a billion trillion
quadrillion quintillion. In the latter case we would be alone in the
universe.

Long
story short, the Astrobiology study basically says that if we are
alone in the universe, then it must be really, really hard for life
to get started on a planet and evolve to a state where intelligent
beings exist. But we already knew that. What the study does not do is
give us any basis for estimating the number of extraterrestrial
civilizations that exist, nor does it even show a likelihood that
extraterrestrials have existed. There may well be reasons for
thinking we are not alone, reasons pertaining to the desire of a
Creator to avoid a “only one flower in the huge desert” type of
universe, or reasons relating to sightings of UFO's, or reasons
relating to a general but debatable philosophical principle that we
should tend to avoid believing that incredibly improbable things
happened locally. But the Astrobiology study does not provide any
such reason, other than the “there's so many places where life
could evolve” reason that has already been known for decades.

Contrary
to the insinuation of the Astrobiology paper (and its press release),
our scientists still don't have any idea whether the rest of the
universe is an empty desert or a universe teeming with life.

Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Normally Scientific
American has some fairly intelligent articles, although it
occasionally gives us goofy drivel that insults the intelligence of
anyone who managed to progress beyond elementary school. An example
is a recent article entitled “What Neuroscience Says About Free
Will.”

The author suggests an
absurd hypothesis: “Perhaps in the very moments that we experience
a choice, our minds are rewriting history, fooling us into thinking
that this choice—that was actually completed after its consequences
were subconsciously perceived—was a choice that we had made all
along.” Subconscious “rewriting history” in just a moment of
time? Get real.

The author then describes
an experiment he did apparently designed to support this idea. The
experiment is described as follows:

Participants were
repeatedly presented with five white circles in random locations on a
computer monitor and were asked to quickly choose one of the circles
in their head before one lit up red. If a circle turned red so fast
that they didn’t feel like they were able to complete their choice,
participants could indicate that they ran out of time. Otherwise,
they indicated whether they had chosen the red circle (before it
turned red) or had chosen a different circle. Unbeknownst to
participants, the circle that lit up red on each trial of the
experiment was selected completely randomly by our computer script.
Hence, if participants were truly completing their choices when they
claimed to be completing them—before one of the circles turned
red—they should have chosen the red circle on approximately 1 in 5
trials. Yet participants’ reported performance deviated
unrealistically far from this 20% probability, exceeding 30% when a
circle turned red especially quickly.

The author suggests
absurdly that this little test suggests something
about free will – that “it might be nothing more than a trick the
brain plays on itself.” The experiment suggests nothing at all
about free will. The experiment simply tells us minor stuff about
human performance and memory that we already knew.

Here are some basic facts
about human performance and memory that are rather well known:

When they don't have
much motivation, people may perform poorly on tests that require
concentration.

People may perform
poorly on boring tests.

People may perform
poorly on tests that ask them to do something they have never tried
to do.

People remember
fairly well interesting or important things (such as a human face),
but may have a poor remembrance of abstract things such as the
position of white circles on a computer screen.

People have a good
memory for important choices, but don't remember well meaningless
choices such as which of 5 white circles on a computer screen they
chose in their minds.

Performance tends to
deteriorate when things are sped up so that things are appearing on
the test screen “especially quickly.”

The fact that performance
tends to degrade unpredictably when humans interface with a machine
that is sped up “especially quickly” has been known since as
least the 1950's, when it was demonstrated in this hilarious scene
from the “I Love Lucy” television show starring Lucille Ball.

Given all these things, it
is predictable that you would get exactly the results reported, even
if free will is perfectly real, and even if there is nothing at all
like “the mind tricking itself.”

Now given these facts,
imagine you are some college student who has signed up for some test
like the test described. You know that no matter how poorly you
perform, you will get the same reward (which may be an hourly wage
or perhaps some academic credit). So when the test speeds up, are
you going to concentrate very hard, trying real hard to remember
where those boring little white circles were on the screen? Knowing
that it makes no difference whether you try hard, you will be just as
likely to not try very hard (perhaps while the test is running,
you'll be daydreaming or thinking about that pretty woman you saw
last night). So when you see some little red circles popping up at
a faster rate, there's a good chance that you'll just kind of “flip
a coin” in your mind as to whether or not you specify that was the
position that you previously chose in your mind. Knowing that the
experimenter can't know which white circle you chose in your mind,
you may be thinking to yourself, “No one will ever know.” Given
a certain fraction of slacker subjects who are just lazily taking
this kind of approach to the test, we would expect exactly the
results reported.

Even if we imagine no such
slacker subjects, the results reported could be plausibly explained
by simply imagining that humans don't do very well at remembering
meaningless choices they have made, and don't remember well the
positions of meaningless things. In fact, we're not even very good at
remembering the position of meaningful things. If you ask someone to
bring up an image of Brad Pitt, and then close the image, and then
ask that person on which fourth of the computer screen Brad's head
was located, there is maybe a 25% chance they'll give the wrong
answer. The fact that there was an option in the test for specifying
“I didn't have time to choose” means very little, because
subjects would have a psychological aversion for selecting an option
which might tend to identify them as slow-minded (a kind “I'm a
slow dummy” button).

The author's laughable
suggestion that the predictable result of the experiment is an
example of neuroscience telling us something about free will (that
free will is an illusion) is just an example of pretentious glory
hunger. Entirely lacking in such grandiose implications, the trivial
experiment is so unsurprising that it deserves nothing but a yawn.
The experiment is also not an example of neuroscience, which the
Merriam Webster dictionary tells us is “ a branch (as
neurophysiology) of the life sciences that deals with the anatomy,
physiology, biochemistry, or molecular biology of nerves and nervous
tissue and especially with their relation to behavior and learning.”
Doing little experiments like this (without monitoring of the brain)
is not neuroscience, but mere garden-variety psychology
experimentation. Psychology experimentation is soft science, and it
should not be sold as hard science.

The lesson we can learn
here is that we should not assume scientists are always reliable
interpreters of the data they collect. They very often are not. Given
a choice between interpreting some data in a plausible way, and
between interpreting the data in some implausible way that matches
his philosophical biases, a scientist may choose the latter.

Sunday, May 1, 2016

Given its subtitle, you
might not expect too much from John Hands' 2015 tome entitled Cosmo
Sapiens: Human Evolution From the Origin of the Universe. In my
mind the subtitle suggests the idea that humans have been around from
the time of the origin of the universe, which is not at all an idea
that Hands actually advances. But despite its unfortunate subtitle,
and despite a few analytic missteps here and there, this large volume
is overall a first-rate work offering an astounding breadth of
learning, combined with some penetrating insights that puncture the
explanatory pretensions of quite a few contemporary scientists.

The task that Hands takes
upon himself in writing this book is an enormous one: that of
considering all of the great origin questions (such as the origin of
the universe, cosmic structure, life, and the human mind), without
taking any stock assertions for granted, trying to accept nothing on
the basis of authority. Hands basically tries to take an approach
like this: don't trust any of the generalizations of scientists, but
always attempt to probe into the evidence claimed to support such
generalizations, and attempt to see whether this evidence justifies
such claims. Hands also seems to take an approach like this: always
thoroughly examine alternative explanations besides the explanations
generally recommended by scientific orthodoxy. This is a very
refreshing approach, much better than the standard science-writer
approach of trustingly regurgitating whatever “official party line”
is fashionable among a particular group of scientists.

Hands first looks at the
question of the universe's origin. He looks critically at the Big
Bang theory and the supplementary "cosmic inflation theory" created later mainly to try to
explain enormous fine-tuning of the universe's expansion rate at the
very beginning of time. Quite rightly, Hands punctures the case for
this cosmic inflation theory, pointing out that there is no adequate
evidence for it. Hands seems to suggest that various problems with
the Big Bang mean that it is not a solid theory of the universe's
origin. But I think as long as we are willing to accept fine-tuning
at the very beginning, and keep things as theoretically simple as
possible, without cluttering things up with ornate speculations like
the cosmic inflation theory, then the Big Bang idea works pretty well as a
basic description of the universe's beginning – just a description,
not an explanation. Hands is correct, however, when he says this on
page 102: “Neither science nor reasoning offers a convincing
explanation of the origin and form of the universe, and hence of the
origin of the matter and energy of which we consist.”

Hands then has a chapter
entitled “The Evolution of Matter on a Large Scale.” Hands
punctures some holes in claims that modern cosmology can explain the
large scale structure of the universe. He notes that while
cosmologists claim that gravitation caused density inhomogeneities to
grow into galaxies, the cosmic background radiation indicates that
300,000 years after the Big Bang, matter was uniform to one part in
100,000, “which is far too little density variation for
gravitational instability to cause any structures to form,”
says Hands (page 117). Hands concludes on page 126 that “neither
cosmology's orthodox...model nor any alternative model currently
provides a scientifically robust explanation of the evolution of
matter on a large scale.”

How did we go from the Big Bang to something this ordered?

On page 156 Hands makes
this complaint:

Cosmologists often make
assertions that have little scientific
justification. Their language frequently reflects that of a belief
system rather than that of a science, and the response of
institutional cosmology to reputable scientists who have different
interpretations of data or who advance alternative conjectures is too
often reminiscent of a Church dealing with dissenters.

Hands
later notes, “The way in which the biology establishment treats
dissenters from within and questioners from without is all too
reminiscent of that shown by the cosmology establishment.”

Turning
to the origin of life, Hands shows how weak are all current
conjectures as to how life first appeared. He concludes on page 245,
“It is very probably beyond the ability of science to explain the
origin of life.” On page 411 he notes, “No scientific hypothesis
explains why proteins..form from combinations of up to only 20
different amino acids out of some 500 known amino acids.” He also
notes, “Biochemistry's orthodox account of how life emerged from a
primordial soup of such chemicals lacks experimental support and is
invalid because, among other reasons, there is an overwhelming
statistical improbability that random reactions in an aqueous
solution could have produced self-replicating RNA molecules.”

On
pages 344 to 349, Hands discusses a rather long list of things that
NeoDarwinism orthodoxy fails to explain. The items listed by Hands
include these (among others):

Stasis
and rapid speciation (the fact that species tend to appear quite
suddenly in the fossil record, and then often show no signs of
evolution for very many millions of years).

Speciation
(Hands says “No studies of living species show the evolution of
new species according to the NeoDarwinian mechanism.”)

Organismal
enbryology and development. Hands notes that the orthodox model
does not explain the mystery of morphogenesis, how a very tiny
fertilized ovum at the moment of conception is able to progress into
a human embryo and then into a human baby.

Progressive
complexification. Hands notes that NeoDarwinists often find
themselves claiming that there is no arrow of progress in evolution,
despite dramatic evidence of exactly such a thing, most notably in
the origin of humans.

This phrase “progressive
complexification” is one that we might actually use as a two-word
summary of the history of the universe. But our scientists have no
unifying principle to explain such a thing. They have a unifying
principle to explain how a universe might gradually fall apart (the
idea of entropy), but no unifying principle to explain how the
universe could go from super-dense particle soup to civilized beings. Isn't it
time they started to suspect that the same thing driving the
complexification of lifeless matter may be driving the
complexification of biological organisms?

Hands draws little in the
way of original new conclusions, but that's no problem. His main job
seems to be to show that our scientists know much less than they
often claim to know, and that the great origins questions are mainly
unanswered and still deeply mysterious. At this job he has succeeded
admirably.

Copyright Notice

All posts on this blog are authored by Mark Mahin, and are protected by copyright. Copyright 2013-2014 by Mark Mahin. All rights reserved. Any resemblance between any fictional character and any real person is purely coincidental.